The Mystery of the Incarnate God in Flannery O'Connor's Short Story A
Temple of The Holy Ghost.

A Temple of The Holy Ghost is the one piece of fiction unique
among the Flannery O'Connor corpus for its distinctly Catholic theme; the
reader being treated to an insight into the effect of a Catholic upbringing on
an adolescent girl living in the American South. The title is a clear reference
to a term familiar to most Catholics practising their faith prior to 1970. The
expression refers to God creating each person in His own image--each possessing
an immortal soul. The term first surfaced with St. Paul who reminded the Church
members of Corinth1 that their bodies were Temples
of The Holy Ghost to be used only for God's glory, meaning that God is exalted
in the exchange and gift of the self in marriage; whereas sexual
immorality--using others only for pleasure or gain--was a sin against the body
given to man by God.

The story is told through the eyes of a twelve year old girl who throughout
the story is called just "the child". For the reader there is no cosy
familiarity with her character. We're not told her name nor do we get to know
much about her personality. We're kept at arm's length; the focus being on
the child's view of life, which in this instance is presented through the
weekend visit to her home of two cousins Susan and Joanne--immature and scatty
fourteen year old girls boarding at the local convent school. The child however,
despite lapses in behaviour, displays wisdom well beyond her years; wisdom
resulting no doubt from a combination of her solid Catholic home background
combined with a willingness to absorb instruction in spiritual matters.

Early on we learn that the two convent girls have recently been told by some
elderly, unworldly nun, that the most effective way to repel the advances of any
young man in the back seat of a car is to say, "stop sir! I am a Temple of
the Holy Ghost," and throughout the weekend the girls address each other as
Temple one and Temple two, after which they collapse into hysterics. The child's
mother however backs the nun's advice and affirms the doctrine that each human
being is in fact a Temple of the Holy Ghost, a response causing mild
astonishment for the two young visitors.

A Temple of the Holy Ghost was first published in 1954. The story
presages the coarsening of Western Culture marked in the 1960s by the birth of
radical feminism and its corrosive effect on traditional family life. The
laughter at the feeble advice on how to combat the world of lustful men shows
the two girls' unconscious alignment with the mores of a society that
increasingly saw goodness and innocence as targets for mockery and scorn.
However the hothouse environment of the convent may also have exacerbated that
problem. On at least one occasion O'Connor opined that overly pious religious
instruction is not the most effective way to equip young women (and men) for the
moral rigours of the world. O'Connor herself was taught by nuns in grade
school in Savannah Georgia, but in 1938 the family moved to Milledgeville where,
because there was no alternative, she was enrolled at the local public school
(Peabody High). It was a critical time for O'Connor but her Catholic faith was
by then sufficiently embedded to survive the transition. If anything, exposure
at high school to the American South's prevailing moral climate of bigotry and
rapidly mounting secularism undoubtedly strengthened her faith. As she famously
said, “you have to push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.”
So why should anyone be surprised at the direction O'Connor's writing career
ultimately settled on? By her own admission, the rationale of her fiction is
founded on the relevance of Christ's redemption illumined by the actions of
those who have rejected it. And so, returning to the child in this story, we can
see in her that combination of innocence and wisdom that unquestionably
characterised Flannery O'Connor in her formative years.

Not far into the story we find the child's mother racking her brains for
ways to keep Susan and Joanne "safely" entertained for the weekend.
The child makes a series of intentionally absurd suggestions before hitting on
the idea that they enlist the help of the two Wilkinses boys, Wendell and Corey.
The mother initially warms to the idea but then concedes that being, “only
farm boys, [the] girls would turn their noses up at them.” The child persists,
reminding her mother that both boys were planning to become Church of God
preachers, rubbing it in with the unnecessary rider, “because you don't have
to know anything to be one.”

The mother again ponders the suggestion and convinces herself of its
usefulness by saying the girls, “would be perfectly safe with those boys all
right,” and straight away phones their mother to arrange things.

In anticipation of the visit, Susan and Joanne smarten themselves up. When
Wendell and Corey arrive, the child observes the proceedings from the top of a
barrel hidden in some bushes. The girls sit together on the porch swing giggling
and talking to each other while the boys sit on the steps banister. Beginning a
shy courtship, Cory blows softly on his harmonica while Wendell strums his
guitar, and looking “at Susan with a dog like loving look,” he begins to
sing. The songs are popular Southern hymns including “The Old Rugged Cross”.
Cutting in to stop them, the girls, “sing with their convent trained voices,”
the Medieval Latin hymn "Tantum Ergo"2.
The child, from her observation place, “watched the boys' faces turn with
perplexed frowning stares at each other as if they were being made fun of,”
and when the hymn was finished she heard Wendell say, “that must be Jew
singing.” A remark that infuriates the child so much she can't stop herself
roaring, “you big dumb Church of God ox,” at which she falls off the barrel,
quickly picks herself up and flees around the side of the house in
embarrassment.

I think it's obvious O'Connor devised this scene to throw light on the
gulf that exists between mature Catholic practice and doctrine, and the raw and
immature perceptions of what constituted Christianity for those languishing in
the Church of God. The child could see the difference and so to could the girls,
who couldn't help but notice the reaction to their rendering of "Tantum
Ergo". With that Latin hymn they knew immediately they had something over
the boys whose banal “what a friend we have in Jesus” smacked of Sola Fide3 with its simplistic believe-and-be-saved mind-set. There's also classic irony
in the child calling Wendell a “big dumb Church of God Ox.” St Thomas
Aquinas, arguably Christianity's greatest philosopher, was sometimes referred
to in his lifetime as The Dumb Ox – presumably because he seldom set down his
thoughts or spoke until the argument he had been mulling over was resolved.

After supper the quartet head for the local Fair. The child, having been left
at home, spends the evening in her room pacing up and down, allowing full play
to her imagination and occasionally glancing out the window toward where the
fairground searchlight beam plays in the night sky. She begins reflecting on her
common faults and sins, including her disdainful sufferance of her school's
visiting Baptist preacher. Finally, kneeling at her bedside to pray, her mind
abruptly settles on Wendell and Cory and her bedtime prayer ends with a
resounding "thank you" that she was “not in the Church of God”.
Perhaps this prayer mirrors a comment O'Connor's mother may have made after
Flannery quite likely grumbled about the visiting preacher at Peabody High.
Might she not have told her daughter how thankful she should be not to be in a
Church like that? Yes we would have to admit that bigotry can flow both ways and
throughout the story O'Connor's integrity would not allow her to conceal
that fact.

Just before midnight the girls return and wake the child with their giggling.
They try to keep secret from her the subject of their giggles but the child
tricks them into revealing and describing their memorable encounter with the
Freak.

The following afternoon Susan and Joanne don their convent school uniforms
and together with the mother and the child are driven by Alonzo back to the
Convent in the middle of town. The nun who welcomes them urges the mother and
the child to stay and attend Benediction4, which has
just started. With no option available except to accompany her mother and the
nun, the child grudgingly enters the chapel where Tantum Ergo is again being
sung, the air is full of incense and the monstrance5 occupies the centre of the altar with the vested priest and white surplus clad
altar boys kneeling in front. The child, realising she was in the presence of
God, kneels and prays. The priest then raises the monstrance containing the “shining
ivory white” Blessed Sacrament6, and the child's
thoughts again return to Susan and Joanne's account of the fairground tent
where the hermaphrodite freak displayed itself saying, “I don't dispute hit.
This is the way He wanted me to be.”

As they left the chapel the nun with a mischievous smile “swooped down”
on the child and gave her a smothering hug that mashed the side of her face into
the crucifix “hitched onto [the nun's] belt”7.
In the car on the way home, the child watched the setting sun resembling a huge
red ball like an elevated host drenched in blood sinking out of sight behind the
tree line. The sun as symbol of the Eucharistic Host--nature ennobled by
grace--the blazing disc of the sun with its power to upstage gravity--enabling
plants to absorb its energy and grow upward toward the light--mirroring the duty
of human beings to align themselves--orient themselves favourably toward
receiving the light of God's grace. After all, human beings seek nourishment
to recover strength from the exertion of work and the Eucharist8 received in good heart is the nourishment available to Catholic Christians
enabling them to recover from the exertion of avoiding illusion and focusing on
the one true god. And, as the Gospels are at pains to point out, transforming
ourselves with our own resources is impossible.

In Catholic worship and practise it is the Eucharist that marks the radical
divide separating Catholicism from Protestantism. O'Connor once declared that
the Eucharist was the centre of her existence. The vast majority of Protestant
denominations condemn Catholic reverence for the Eucharist as Idolatry9.
The Eucharist was instituted at the Last Supper10 being a covenant made by Jesus with his followers in which the bread and wine
signify the person of Christ. Contact with the consecrated bread is contact with
God--a sacrament11, a contact desired by both God
and Man in the love that unites heaven and earth. On this point, the words of
Jesus at the Last Supper are very explicit, “This is my body. This is my
blood,” and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are all in accord on the
matter. St John (6:32-58) records Jesus preaching that eating his flesh and
drinking his blood was necessary to salvation. The reaction from the crowd was
one of outrage. “This is intolerable language,” they muttered while leaving.
Jesus never relented; He didn't call them back to tell them it was only a
symbol.

Returning from the convent near the end of the story, Alonzo told the mother
and the child how much he'd enjoyed the fair, especially since after his visit
the Church Elders had ordered it closed down, which begs the question; what is
the purpose of the Church? Did Christ found an army to rid the world of sin or
was His Church intended as a hospital for sinners--with entry free to all who
sought treatment? Well here we have the (non-Catholic) Church Elders adopting
the church as army analogy. They used their influence to have the fair shut
down--why? The Elders no doubt saw themselves as the guardians of public morals,
taking upon themselves the duty to re-establish the Garden of Eden here on
earth. They couldn't appreciate that the "evil" they perceived (at
the fair) was a manifestation of the distance between God and humanity and that
God should be loved through and in spite of that evil. Instead their faith was
governed by insecurity and fear--the fear of placing their trust in God's
providence. O'Connor however confirmed her faith in God's Providence by
portraying the fairground freak as living its life to the best of its ability.
The situation of the freak was a striking parallel to O'Connor's situation;
she lived her life to the full knowing the Lupus she carried could kill her at
any time12. Both Flannery O'Connor and the freak
lived knowing and accepting the affliction God permitted them to endure--their
contentment resting in being what God wanted them to be.

Lowly bending, deep adoring / Lo! The sacrament we hail:
/ Types and shadows have their ending / Newer rites of grace prevail: / Faith
for all defects supplying / Where the feeble senses fail. / To the everlasting
Father / And the Son who reigns on high / With the Holy Ghost proceeding /
Forth from each eternally / Be salvation honour blessing / Might and endless
majesty. Amen.

6. Blessed Sacrament: The term used to
describe the Host during Benediction.

7. In a letter to A. (Betty Hester) dated Dec
16th 1955 in The Habit of Being, O'Connor's Collected Letters, O'Connor
wrote: “Remember that when the nun hugged the child, the crucifix on her belt
was mashed into the side of the child's face, so that one accepted embrace was
marked with the ultimate all inclusive symbol of love, and that when the child
saw the sun again, it was a red ball, like an elevated Host drenched in blood
and it left a line like a clay road in the sky.”

8. Eucharist: In the Roman Catholic Mass the
Eucharist is the re-presentation in an un-bloody manner of Christ's
crucifixion. The consecrated unleavened bread (Host) becomes the actual body of
Christ. The wine is also consecrated into Christ's Precious Blood.

11. In Roman Catholic practice a Sacrament is
a liturgical contact desired by both God and Man. There are seven sacraments:
Baptism, Confirmation, Reconciliation (Confession of sins), Reception of the
Eucharist (Holy Communion), Marriage, Holy Orders (raising to the priesthood),
Sacrament of the Sick (anointing and prayers for those seriously ill or dying).

12. Lupus: O'Connor was afflicted with this
disease at the age of twenty-six and lived in a precarious state of health for
the next thirteen years. The Lupus became reactivated through necessary surgery
in early 1964 and O'Connor died from its complications on August 3rd 1964 at
the age of thirty-nine.